BRITTON - Melanie Jones remembers smelling the jet fuel. She remembers feeling the building shake around her, seeing the airplane wing sticking out from the building. "I remember wishing for a lot of days it had been a dream," said Jones, 48, of Britton. Sept. 11, 2001, was a waking nightmare for all Americans. But Jones, a Britton native who worked at the Pentagon the day terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into it, was in the middle of the madness. Jones, who is now associate broker and officer manager for Britton's Vold Auctioneers and Realty, spent 20 years in the U.S. Air Force. For the last five years of her service, she provided information technology support for the deputy chief of staff of air and space operations, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, at the Pentagon. The massive building was an exciting place to work, Jones said; she got to meet former President George W. Bush, as well as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Eight years ago, Sept. 11 started out as a bright, sunny day, she said. But that quickly changed. Pentagon offices had CNN running constantly, she said, so when the first two planes hit the Twin Towers, employees knew. Jones recalls one of her co-workers who had a "sixth sense" about him making a prediction. "He said, 'We're next,'" she said. He was right. Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon's west wall at 9:37 a.m. ET, killing 184 people in the building and on the plane, according to national media reports. When the plane hit, the whole building shook, she said. She could smell jet fuel instantly. Everybody - close to 40,000 people, she estimates - was evacuating, but calmly. Jones said her military training kicked in; military personnel always practice for disaster. Outside, she saw the wing of the plane sticking out. When the government learned of the last plane, which ultimately went down in a Pennsylvania field, people were told to go across the interstate, out of the parking lot, she said. The lot was marked off with yellow tape. The wedge of the Pentagon that was struck had been emptied because it was being remodeled, Jones said, or the devastation could have been worse. Her office was almost all the way across the mile-around Pentagon from the section that was hit. Her then-young children - Britton graduates Travis and Kala Avera (now Kala Hook) - had heard about the attacks at school in their nearby Virginia suburb. But school officials tried to shelter students from the news because a lot of their parents worked in D.C., Jones said. "Nobody knew who was going to come home and who wasn't," she said. Though cell phone service wasn't working at first, Jones was eventually able to get through to her parents, Maurice and Dorothy Jones, who live on a farm near Britton. They had been trying to call her - worried about his grandchildren, her dad had considered driving out to get them in case something had happened to his daughter, Jones said. She remembers how her father's voice broke when he heard her voice. From co-workers and colleagues, Jones heard horrifying tales - jumping into a Pentagon office to avoid a ball of fire raging down the hallway, the nose of the plane crashing into an office. One woman was driving near Arlington National Cemetery when the plane was nearing the Pentagon. The aircraft was so low that she could see the faces of the passengers onboard through the windows. Those faces will be forever etched in the woman's mind, Jones said. The next day, Pres. Bush urged government employees to go back to work. Jones remembers coming up over a hill on her way to work that morning and seeing the Pentagon burning. "There (were) a lot of people who never came back to work after that," she said. But Jones never considered not going back. In the service, you take an oath, she said, and that means you do what you are told. She didn't move back to Britton - something her family had always planned to do - until 2004. Jones said the people on Sept. 11 had no idea that morning it was going to be their day. "I figured there was a reason I was not (killed)," she said. She remembers feeling grateful, and realizing every day is a gift. A lot of people who weren't in uniforms gave their lives that day, she said. Though the trauma didn't seem to affect her too intensely on the surface, Jones said she suffered from extreme tightness in her neck muscles for the next few weeks. She realizes now it was probably from the stress of the situation. Her kids, too, didn't seem too affected at the time, she said. But years later, her son, now a U.S. Navy rescue swimmer, got a tattoo, which he said he got for her. It says "9-11. Never forget." It's a statement Jones believes in. "I think it's very important that people remember."